MyCardBlog

Tax-free period is coming soon! Yep, it’s a wonderful opportunity that we can take advantage of to save a huge amount of money. I think it would be helpful if I can summarize all the tax sales across the nation. Then I “google” on the internet about all the states and collect the information on any sales tax holidays they are having. This year many states have changed their sales tax holiday plans. You should double check the sales tax holiday event in your state before you place the orders.

Below is a comprehensive list that I could manage and I hope you find it useful. Please note that not all states have a sales tax holiday. And if you are a resident at Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire or Oregon, you’re already tax-free!

Alabama

Time: August 1~3, 2008

clothing – less than $100 per item

computers, software, and computer supplies – less than $750

school supplies – less than $50 per item

books – less than $30 per item

Louisiana

Time: May 24~25, 2008

hurricane preparedness sale exempting purchases up to $1,500 for emergency items

Connecticut

Time: August 17~23, 2008

clothing and footwear – less than $300

Iowa

Time: August 1~2, 2008

clothing and footwear – less than $100 per item

Tennessee

Time: April 25~27, 2008

Clothing – less than $100 per item
school and art supplies - less than $100 per item
computers - $1,500

Texas

Time: August 15~17, 2008

clothing and footwear – less than $100 per item

backpacks – less than $100

Energy Star Sales Tax Holiday May 24 – 26, 2008

Eligible tax-free items can be found here.

Virginia

Time 1: May 25~27, 2008

designated hurricane preparedness equipment priced – less than $60 per item

portable generators priced – less than $1,000 per item

Time 2: August 1~3, 2008

Back-to-School sales tax holiday on school supplies – less than $20 per item

clothing and footwear – less than $100 per item

Time 3: October 10~13, 2008

Energy Star Qualified products including appliances purchased for noncommercial home or personal use – less than $2,500 each

Missouri

Time: August 1~2, 2008

clothing – less than $100 each

school supplies – less than $50 each

computer and equipment – less than $3500

Georgia

Time: July 31 – August 3, 2008

clothing – less than $100 per item

computer and equipment – less than $1500

school supplies – less than $20 per item

energy efficient appliances – $1500 or less

North Carolina

Time: August 1~3, 2008

clothing – less than $100 per item

school instructional materials – less than $300 per item

sports equipment – less than $50 per item

computers, software, computer supplies – less than $250 per item

Washington D.C.

Time: No official announcement yet. (a week in August and November)

clothing, accessories and shoes – less than $100

school supplies – less than $100

Oklahoma

Time: No announcement yet. (a weekend in August)

clothing and footwear – less than $100 per item

New Mexico

Time: No announcement yet. (first weekend in August)

clothing and footwear – less than $100 each

school supplies – less than $15 each

computers – less than $1000

Massachusetts

Time: usually the second weekend in August

anything with a sale price less than $2,500 (some exceptions)

Florida

Time: August 2~8, 2008

clothing, shoes and backpacks – less than $50 per item

school supplies – less than $10 per item

Do you have any problems about handling and saving your money? Do you need some tips on how to save and smartly spend your money? Do you want to find a one-stop site that can give you all the information about money? If your answer is yes to any one of the above questions, you’d better check out Money.co.uk. Money.co.uk surely is a website that you can find tons of high quality articles and a variety of information about money related matters.

Money.co.uk is a brand new financial portal with resources, materials, and information on how to save money, spend money and make money. They offer the latest money saving tips, tricks, deals and promotions. Money.co.uk also contains a lot of useful information about credit cards, loans, mortgages, insurance, savings, shares, and utilities. You can get everything you need there about your personal finance and daily life. When you get there, you will find out that every section of Money.co.uk is talking about different aspects of money. Another feature makes me fall in love with this site is you can get tremendous information-news, advices, comparisons, and other useful tips-from every section of this site. For example, at the credit cards section, you can compare top UK credit cards along with many credit cards related news, tips, and articles. If you are new to credit cards, you can refer to “credit cards explained” section about basics of credit cards. They also provide links to apply for those tops UK credit cards. Once you have made the decision on which card to pick up, you can easily apply for that card by click the “Apply” button.

Money.co.uk also provide insurance like car insurance, van insurance, home insurance, pet insurance, travel insurance, motorbike insurance and many others. The insurance market is really competitive nowadays. If you don’t know which one to choose from, you can use their “compare insurance” service to get free quote from many insurance companies and find out the top insurance offer. Of course, you can always get latest news and tips about all kinds of insurance there.

Money.co.uk also provides free RSS subscription service to their visitors. By signing up RSS feed, you can get the latest information about money stuffs from Money.co.uk. They also offer free money savings tips newsletter. The newsletters will be delivered to your email whenever there is some useful information to pass on. You can also get money saving e-book from Money.co.uk. This is really an amazing site!

Whenever you want to get some information about money, you can always go to Money.co.uk. It’s a “one-stop” site about money.

I have several posts about getting some small money by taking some online surveys. (Actaully, some of them are not small!) The first post about making money by taking surveys is about SurveySavvy which is a professional survey company. I joined this survey company 3 months ago. Today I received the first payment—$11 from them. Although $11 is not too much, but I’m really glad that I can get a free buffet by answering some stupid questions online. Following is the check they sent to me today.

SurveySavvy is part of Luth Research LLC., a market research leader since 1977. Based in San Diego, Luth Research LLC has conducted countless interviews, focus groups and surveys for their clients. They have over 3 million members across 190 countries earning cash by participating in their online paid surveys.

If you search through the internet, you can find many positive reports about this survey company. Their payout is really impressive which is range from $2 to $30 for each survey based the length of the survey. They have millions of participants in their database. The questions is how can you get the survey chance to get more money? Based on my own experience, I can give out several tips:

1). During the sign up process, you’ d better say you involve in a computer or modern technology related industry. Usually people in this industry can get the most survey invitations.

2). Put your position as a manager or business owner. Because you can make the decision!

3). Be careful about the screen questions. Before they offer you a survey, you have to answer some small questions about the official survey. If you can’t pass the screen questions, you can’t take the survey. Tip: they will tell you what the survey will be. Have that in mind and try to say you are related to that survey. For example, the coming survey will be about iPod, then you’d better say you have an iPod or you are going to a new one.

4). Take every chance they send out to you. And there is no minimum balance requirement for you to take the money out of your account.

Take the chance to get some free buffets for you!!!

A summary of posts in this week:

$50 from Bank of America World MasterCard with World Points

WaMu Savings for Success

$5 from Sears and Ebates

$100 Bonus from TD Ameritrade

Want A Credit Card? — Get The Easiest Ones

The Four Credit Cards That Everyone Should Have

$5 from Sears by signing up email ad alerts. This may be the easiest $5 to get so far. Click this link to sears.com and then click “get email alerts” to registration page. Fill in your name, address and email address, you’re expected to receive the $5 sears gift card in about 4 weeks. NOTE: Offer is valid from 01/30/2008-04/06/2008. Limit one free gift card per household. If you have more than one address/email address, you can get more!

$5 from Ebates.com. Click this link to ebates.com. After registration, you will get $5 in your ebates.com account. In order to make this $5 payable to you, you should finish online shopping through ebates.com before a certain time. Why choose ebates.com? Ebates.com is a large online shopping rewards site. It’s very similar to Chase Rewards Plus. You click their link to buy products online, then they will give you a certain amount cash back (from 1% to 25%). You have to remember that you can still earn cash back from your credit cards! If you accumulate more than $5 in your account in 3 months, a check will be mailed to you. Of course, you can choose to use PayPal to receive the money. For example, if you you want to buy a Canon S850 at Staples.Com ($200). You can login at ebates.com and then click the staples.com link at ebates.com to finish this transaction. Within about 2~3 days, the 2% cash back will appear in your account ($4). If you use a simplycash business card to buy this camera, you can still earn 5% on that card ($10). If you make a lot of purchases online, ebates.com is a good choice. Another feature is they offer free coupons! This will save you a lot of time. This feature makes ebates.com one of the most popular online shopping cash rewards site.

Some featured online merchants: 4% at Target, 6% at Adobe, 1% at BestBuy, 4% at CircuitCity, 2% at Dell Home and 1% at Dell Small Business, 2% at Staples, and 4% at Sears.

Register now to save money!

Following this link, you can get $20 Amazon.Com gift card by taking a short survey. The questions are very simple. You can finish it in about 2 minutes.

Dear Librarian Gateway User:

We are asking for your participation in a short online survey regarding communications between publishers and librarians.

Your feedback is highly valued. The questionnaire will take just a few minutes to complete, and your contribution will play a significant role in our decision making.

Your participation is entirely anonymous; responses will be analyzed in the aggregate only, and will never be associated with individual participants.

Please follow this link to complete the questionnaire.

To thank you for your time, participants will have the option to receive either a £10 Amazon.co.uk® gift card or a $20 Amazon.com® gift card*.

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

If you want to get more gift cards, all you have to do is to clear the cookie. Then you can start over again!!! At the end of the survey, you have to fill in your contact information. (E=Email, T=Telephone.) Hurry up!

It’s time to prepare your tax return for 2007. I believe a lot of people will buy a copy of TurboTax or TaxAct from retailers like Staples, WalMart or other places. Hereby I’d like to provide an amazing deal to get a free TurboTax Basic or Deluxe. (I got this deal from slickdeals.net. Credit goes to echostorm at slickdeals.net.)

Use this link to intuit.com: http://turbotax.intuit.com/affiliate/06tycmep

Click “downloads” at the top tabs.

Choose whatever version you want (Deluxe is recommended.):

Basic and Deluxe: FREE
Premier: $20.00
Home & Business: $45.00

And then you can choose check out to place the order to download this software directly from intuit.com for free!

Of course, use the following username and password to login the online account.

tax@trashmail.com
irssucks (Please, please don’t change the username and password there, thank you!)

This is a deal for statefarm customers, however, I don’t know how that guy can make it. Anyway it’s a good deal for all of us. You can also fill state tax return for free! What’s more, you can use State & Federal E-File Free! (e-file works for some states only) This will dramatically accelerate your tax return process!

Here is what I got!

I have copy this deal to my forum. Or see the discussion at slickdeals.net at here.

As an effort to promote the communication with my readers and provide a forum for us to discuss specific topics, I set up a forum at mycardblog. You can access to the forum at www.mycardblog.com/forum. This forum is dedicated to discuss personal finance. I think it’s also a good way to expand your knowledge about money management. I think this forum will also cover some topics that I don’t post here at my blog. Another advantage of forum is all the members can bring latest news, deals and ideas. In this way, you can get the latest information as soon as possible. Anyway, thank you for your support!

Below is a screen shot of the forum:

Another important news I want to put here is ” Banks Are Going to Close Accounts of Risky Customers”.

Given the current state of banks, we have enough reasons to believe that they will shift the aim from mortgages to other risky products. Not to mention that more than 60% Americans carry balance on their at least two credit cards every month. If you are not a profitable customer to them, you are also in the queue. In the next few months, if the credit card issuers close you credit card account or reduce your credit limit without notifying you, don’t be surprised. I also strongly suggest you guys not play AOR recently.

Here is the report from Yahoo.

Reuters: Web bank Egg withdraws cards from riskier customers

LONDON (Reuters) – Egg, the Internet bank owned by Citigroup, will withdraw credit cards from 161,000 customers following a risk review, a spokesman for Egg said on Saturday.

The company has given seven percent of its credit card customers 35 days’ notice that it was ending their card agreements, he said.

“The credit profiles of affected customers had deteriorated between the time they joined Egg and the acquisition (by Citigroup) in May,” Egg said in a statement. “The decision to end these customers’ agreements was taken after conducting a one-off, extensive risk review of our (customers)…”

The move marks another example of how banks are revising their lending criteria amid the credit crunch.

Earlier this week, Britain’s Financial Services Authority said in an annual review that UK banks face their toughest conditions since the 1990s due to escalating consumer defaults.

The customers affected will not be able to use their Egg credit card once the notice period has ended, although they can continue to make minimum monthly repayments or pay up in full.

“Egg is not asking for immediate repayment of balances or making any changes to their current terms and conditions or interest rates,” the company said.

Citigroup bought the business from Prudential in May, 2007.

(Reporting by Gavin Haycock)